Dr. Katja Schiffers

What are the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape species ranges in space and time? How can these biodiversity dynamics be modelled and projections of future scenarios be improved? And which factors modulate biotic interactions and thus species realised niches and community structure? These are the questions that incite most of my ecological research. My work is mainly based on process-based simulation modelling, conceptual work on biodiversity models, phylogenetic approaches and the analysis of existent large-scale distributional data.

The European cost-action HARMBIO (www.harmbio.eu), which I am currently working for, aims at harmonizing current models and datasets of terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity to improve the reliability of future projections of biodiversity change. Our objective in workpackage 4, led by Prof. Dr. Katrin Böhning-Gaese and Prof. Dr. Andy Purvis, is to develop standards for systematic model intercomparison to explore and reduce model-based uncertainty in biodiversity projections.